Sometimes there is nothing better than a good disagreement when you want to better understand an idea. Recently Chris Hedges published an article, in which he called Black Bloc the Cancer in Occupy. Hedges, a war correspondent for decades and now a radical social commentator and activist describes in almost religious terms the need to maintain passive civil disobedience as the only effective means for achieving social change. He warns against the use of violence and specifically what he describes as the tactics of Black Bloc as playing into the hands of establishment forces and their attempts to de-legitimize the occupy movement.
The article caused a lot of very virulent feedback, most of it angry rants against Hedges, but also some excelent responses that detailed the nuances missed by Hedges.
Susie Cagle quite possibly does the best reporting on Occupy Oakland I have run across. In her piece she calls out Hedges for buying into establishment propaganda as well as berating both him and most other journalists for not bothering to do the leg work. As most of the references to Black Bloc violence in the Hedges piece refer to Oakland, she shows him to be both wrong and lazy.
David Graeber is an American anthropology proffesor, anarchist and one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street. In an open letter to Hedges, he explains that black bloc is a tactic and not a movement, the use of anonymity when confronting established power and that Hedges' call for imposing peaceful protest as interpreted by him (or someone else) as a form of violence.
All three pieces are well worth reading and will leave you better informed on the complexities of a democratic protest movement where pluralism is put to the test, how there is a large gap between what is often reported even by those sympathetic to a cause and what people on the ground experienced as actually having taken place and what anarchy and it's tactics represent when not approached as a the destructive dogma it is often presented as being.
Thank you Chris for starting this fire.
I really enjoyed David Graeber's calm and considered dismantling of Hedges' fear based arguments.
ReplyDeleteI was deliberating if to read Graeber's "Debt", that last piece put me over the edge. I just loved the way he built his argument.
ReplyDeleteThe more Hedges I read, the more I become convinced that he is basically orthodoxly religious in his beliefs on what social change needs to be achieved and how. His pluralism is very narrowly defined.